Djo and his journey to ‘The Crux’
‘Stranger Things’ fans will recognise him as Steve Harrington. Music fans know him as Djo. Now, Joe Keery is ready to play the most authentic version of himself, starting with his new album, ‘The Crux’
By Amy Campbell
“THE STREET IS GETTING SO CLEAN,” observes Joe Keery. Outside, a street cleaner is humming loudly, interrupting the actor-musician’s train of thought. He refocuses, takes a bite of his Vegemite toast. “It tastes kind of like soy sauce or something,” he observes, chewing slowly. “Mmm, really good. I’d eat that.” Another rev, and the street cleaner goes silent. Keery smiles, swallows. “All right, back to business.”
It’s mid-February, and Keery is in Australia to play Laneway festival. Sitting across from him, I must resist the urge to ask after the fate of Steve Harrington in the upcoming fifth season of Stranger Things – Keery became known for playing the reformed high school jock with impossibly voluminous hair in the Netflix smash hit. Instead, we’re here to talk about music; since 2019, Keery has been releasing bedroom synth pop under the moniker Djo (pronounced ‘Joe’), composing floaty tracks whenever time became available in his busy shooting schedule (most recently, Keery slicked back his mane to play the slippery Gator Tillman in American TV drama Fargo).
But Djo is no empty rebrand, or actor-turned-musician publicity stunt. Having grown up in an artistic family, Massachusetts-born Keery was playing music well before he was thrust into the Stranger Things-verse, first as DIY project Cool Cool Cool, then as a guitarist and drummer for Chicago psych-rock band Post Animal. His early tracks as Djo were stripped back yet synthy, as if the Cocteau Twins and Talking Heads got together and hashed out some beats. The project was well received by those who discovered it – it had a soft, independent release – and it wasn’t until 2024 that Djo learned what it meant to have a song go viral. Two years after its release, ‘End of Beginning’ – a love letter to the musician’s college days in Chicago – became the basis of a TikTok trend whereby users would post nostalgic clips of their hometowns, or sentimental places. The song skyrocketed to No. 1 on the Global Spotify chart, becoming the platform’s sixth most streamed song in the world in 2024; on TikTok, it has more than 60 billion views. Three years post-release, it was nominated for Best International Song at the 2025 Brit Awards.
In addition to the song going viral were videos of music fans who stumbled across ‘End of Beginning’ organically, realising Djo and Steve Harrington are ‘played’ by the same guy.
“It’s really given me an understanding of what people mean when they’re like, ‘Oh, this song isn’t mine anymore’,” says Keery. “It truly really feels that way, where people have taken it – taken a pretty specific experience from my own life – and applied it to theirs.
“It wasn’t even a single on the last album [2022’s Decide] and a lot of people said to me, ‘Hey, you should make it a single’, and I kind of didn’t feel like it was that.” He laughs with the wonder of hindsight. “Coming to Australia and ending the set playing that track, having a bunch of people singing along with me, is like a really incredible and unique experience.”
Having said that Djo wasn’t a rebrand, early on, there was a visual metamorphosis at play. Performing in a shaggy wig and sunglasses that obscured his face, Keery was conscious of drawing a line between his music and acting careers, because it allowed him to be “less self-conscious”. But now Djo’s third studio album, The Crux, is about to drop. And with it, the disguise is coming off.
“It had kind of served its purpose in my mind,” he explains as he takes another chomp of his toast, this time with a slice of cheese on top. “The purpose of The Crux was to be as authentically open and ‘me’ as I could be. And it felt like it was maybe a little counterproductive to have the wig going on simultaneously. It served its purpose and now it’s time for something new.”
Djo performing as Joe isn’t the only new thing about this chapter. For the first time, Keery recorded the album in a studio. And not just any old studio; The Crux was brought to life at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, inside the same rooms where Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and The Rolling Stones laid down parts of their most iconic records. With more tools at their disposal, Keery and his band were able to create something more “maximalist”.
“It’s been kind of like a bedroom recording project up until this point. I’ve been able to write and record songs on my own, which has been great. But for this record we had more tools . . . I’m inspired by music from the past and the way they used to make records, and I wanted to do that and see what it was like to work in a studio. It really informed the sound. It’s the filter through which all of this has happened.”
The Crux does sound slicker in its production, without sacrificing the dreamy psychedelia of early Djo. Since debuting the catchy lead single ‘Basic Being Basic’ on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in January, the album has generated significant buzz. Keery will have to balance touring it with the launch of Stranger Things Season 5 – his final outing on the show, slated for a late-2025 premiere; similar to the narrative outlined in ‘End of Beginning’, The Crux will mark the closing of one chapter, and the opening of another. One in which Keery embraces making music for himself, as himself.
“I was trying to get out of my own way as much as possible, to allow people to see the most unedited version that I’m comfortable allowing. That was the point: trying to make this album as real to my own life and to me as possible.
“Me and Adam talk about the ‘costume’ of the song,” continues Keery of his long-time collaborator, writer and producer Adam Thein. “There’s the song itself – you write the chords on the paper – and then there’s a ‘costume’ and production that you dress the song up in.” This time, Keery wanted to make the music “as not frilly as possible”. “I wanted it to be a timestamp of what was going on in my life at that moment, so that when I look back when I’m old, it’s like a snapshot of my life right now.”
The Crux is out now.
Opening image is by Pooneh Ghana.
This story appears in the March/April 2025 issue of Esquire Australia with the title “It’s Djo time”, on sale now. Find out where to buy the issue here.
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Djo talks his latest album ‘The Crux’ over some Vegemite toast
